Wall Street Journal: “Chinese President Hu Jintao emphasized the need for cooperation with the U.S. in areas from new energy to space ahead of his visit to Washington this week, but he called the present U.S. dollar-dominated currency system a ‘product of the past’ and highlighted moves to turn the yuan into a global currency.”

Associated Press: “Congress may be less likely to pass legislation on the issue than it had been last year, when both chambers were under Democratic control. A bill to give U.S. companies a means of challenging what they view as an unfair export subsidy sailed through the House, but died in the Senate.”

Northwest Asian Weekly: “The leaf-strewn median on Eternal Peace Road hides a grim secret. Numerous tiny fetuses lie in unmarked graves dug by women from the abortion clinic across the street. The staff at the small clinic in the heart of this ancient city don’t bury most of the fetuses — only those that have reached three or four months, when they clearly resemble miniature babies.”

Doug Bandow writing at The Center for Vision & Values: “There is more than enough bad news to fill the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s latest annual report. Worst of all were the conditions in 13 ‘countries of particular concern.’”

Kyodo News: “The Chinese military will consider launching a preemptive nuclear strike if the country finds itself faced with a critical situation in a war with another nuclear state, internal documents showed Wednesday.”

Jonathan Mirsky reviews [full text via Google News] Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China “By Susan Greenhalgh in the Wall Street Journal: “In the quest for ‘superior’ children and mothers, Ms. Greenhalgh explains, Beijing put aside social, cultural and political factors, and discriminated against whole classes of low-quality people . . . Official pressure to curtail and ‘improve’ births resulted in infanticide and selective abortion, which in turn led to a gender gap among newborns of at best 120 boys to 100 girls. Many Chinese men, therefore, will not find brides, and fewer elderly Chinese will have daughters to comfort and support them.”

Associated Press: “Photos leaked online that appear to show a prototype of China’s first stealth fighter jet were discussed in state media Wednesday – a move that supports claims the country’s military aviation program is advancing faster than expected.”

“The World Bank is issuing its first bonds denominated in China’s yuan in Hong Kong, joining a growing number of borrowers tapping the new debt market as Beijing gradually promotes of its tightly controlled currency abroad.”

Reuters: “China shut down more than 60,000 pornographic websites this year, netting almost 5,000 suspects in the process, a government spokesman said on Thursday, vowing no let-up in its campaign against material deemed obscene.”

Wall Street Journal: “For some, the Vatican’s efforts on behalf of Christian minorities in Islamic countries or among China’s population of 1.3 billion is regarded as worthy and admirable, but only a footnote against the grand sweep of current geopolitical concerns. Iran’s bomb, China’s economic importance and all that. This is a mistake. In these times, the pope’s agenda is the civilized world’s agenda. The pope’s agenda is individual freedom.”

Associated Press: “China is going after Internet phone services such as Skype in a move to protect the country’s state-owned telephone companies, causing alarm among consumers who rely on cheap Internet calls.”

Blue Ridge Times-News: “[T]housands of people viewing the image online since the weekend have accused government officials of gruesomely killing Mr. Qian to silence his six-year campaign to protect fellow villagers in a land dispute.”

Associated Press: “China said it is reducing the amount of rare earths it will export for the first half of the year by more than 10 percent – likely to be an unpopular move worldwide since the minerals are vital to the manufacture of high-tech products.”

Reuters: “‘We hope the Vatican can face the facts of China’s religious freedom and the development of Catholicism in China, and take concrete actions to promote positive conditions for China-Vatican relations,’ ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news briefing. She did not elaborate.” More from The Daily Telegraph.

WorldNetDaily: “Although China is called a major trading partner, it treats U.S. companies like suckers, cheating them coming and going. Beijing even intimidates U.S. businessmen so they don’t dare criticize China’s unfair trade tactics.”

Associated Press: “China is moving closer to deploying a ballistic missile designed to sink an aircraft carrier, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command said in newspaper interview published Tuesday.”

Asia News: “Chinese women have no power of choice over their body and are subjected to constant humiliation and suffering because of the one-child law. At least three times a year they must report for a mandatory pelvic examination (to verify that they are not pregnant); after the first child, they are forced to use an intrauterine contraceptive device, they are subjected to forced sterilization and abortion (up to nine months).”

The Globe and Mail: “China fired back at the Vatican on Wednesday after the Holy See’s recent criticism of Beijing’s religious appointments, calling such a move ‘dangerous’ and harmful to the Catholic church’s development in China.”

New York Times: “Thirty years after it introduced some of the world’s most sweeping population-control measures, the Chinese government continues to use a variety of coercive family planning tactics, from financial penalties for households that violate the restrictions to the forced sterilization of women who have already had one child, according to a report issued by a human rights group.”

Ilya Somin writing at The Volokh Conspiracy: “If [Dikötter's revised figure] of 45 million withstands scrutiny, Mao will have definitively surpassed Joseph Stalin’s overall record as a mass murderer (Stalin’s death toll was more evenly spread between several different episodes of mass murder than Mao’s) . . . it is . . . inexcusable that the mass murders inflicted by Chinese communism remain so little known in the West . . . few Western intellectuals are aware of the scale of these atrocities, and they have had almost no impact on popular consciousness.”

Card. Joseph Zen Zekiun: “The Eighth Assembly of the Representatives of the Chinese Catholics was ‘victoriously’ successful, as ‘victoriously successful’ was the preventing of Liu Xiaobo from going to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Are our leaders are truly proud of similar ‘victories’? The fact that China has become an economic power, allows them to ignore so shamefully the human rights? Those who bow to you for business interests, do they respect you in their hearts? Wake up! Please, save a little the dignity of our great nation, famous for its ancient civilization and its refined etiquette.”

Christian Science Monitor: “The moral of these stories seems clear: If you want kids to succeed, don’t talk about their intelligence. That will only hold them back. Americans like to say that their country is a land of opportunity; that anyone can make it, if they just try hard enough. But our educational system tells another story altogether. By emphasizing who is smart – and who is not – we teach our kids that their inborn capabilities are more important than their sweat and toil.”

CRI English: “A Chinese man was given three years probation by a court in southern Shenzhen city on Thursday for his debated ‘euthanasia efforts’ that led to the death of his ailing spouse, the Guangzhou Daily reports.”

Catholic Herald: “Relations between China and the Vatican are in danger of disintegrating after authorities forced bishops loyal to the Pope to attend a meeting of the state-run Church. Dozens of Chinese bishops were taken to Beijing against their will to take part in the National Congress of Chinese Catholic Representatives to vote for new leaders of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and the Council of Chinese Bishops.”

VOA News: “China is lashing out at a U.S. House of Representatives resolution that calls on Beijing to release jailed dissident and Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, one day before the Nobel award ceremony in Oslo. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu expressed China’s firm opposition to the U.S. congressional resolution.”

Heritage Foundation / The Foundry: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee is set to award the Nobel Peace Prize this Friday to author and 1989 Tiananmen protest participant Liu Xiaobo. But Liu will not attend. He is currently serving an 11-year sentence for co-authoring the Charter 08 manifesto calling for protection of human rights, comprehensive political reforms, and a democratic government in China.”

Christian Science Monitor: “China will award its answer to the Nobel Peace Prize a day before it is bestowed upon jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, giving the ‘Confucius Peace Prize’ to former Taiwan vice-president Lien Chan.”

National Journal: “In the global race for jobs and economic prosperity, the United States is No. 2. And it is likely to remain there for some time. That’s the glum conclusion of most Americans surveyed in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll.”

Christian Science Monitor: “‘Shanghai-China’ outperformed all other global participants in an average of the three areas of evaluation (math, science, and reading). South Korea (2), Hong Kong-China (4), Singapore (5), and Japan (8) also placed in the the top 10. Non-Asian countries in the top 10 were Finland (3), Canada (6), New Zealand (7), Australia (9), and The Netherlands (10). The US was no. 17.”

AP: “China’s bishops opened a meeting Tuesday to choose leaders of the government-backed Catholic church amid tensions with the Vatican after it denounced the recent ordination of a bishop who did not have the pope’s approval.”

Reuters: “China’s engagement with the United Nations is on the rise as its economic power grows, but the West should be cautious with calls for it to act as a responsible world leader, as Beijing’s goals may not be the same as the West’s, said a new report on Friday.”

China Daily: “China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.”

Associated Press: “The Vatican on Wednesday denounced China for ordaining a bishop without papal consent, accusing the government-backed church of gravely damaging the faith and warning that the bishop risked excommunication.”

OneNewsNow: “With the second disappearance of a human rights attorney in China, family members are concerned and are hoping to find help in the U.S. The Jubilee Campaign has been working on the case of Gao Zhisheng since he was taken captive and held incommunicado for more than a year by the Chinese government in 2009.”

Slate: “The Chinese must choose between their government and the pope. There are actually two strains of Catholicism in China. The official, ‘above-ground’ version operates in state-approved churches and is overseen by the Chinese Catholic Bishops Conference and the state-affiliated Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association rather than by the pope.”

Boston Globe: “‘The Nobel Prize fiasco merely strengthens a growing suspicion of China — but also indicates that China feels it has enough power now not to really care about international opinion. Probably a serious miscalculation for China,’ said Christopher Hughes, a professor of China’s international affairs at the London School of Economics.”

Reuters: “The Defense Department is aware that Internet traffic was rerouted briefly through China earlier this year, a Pentagon spokesman said Friday, referring to what a congressionally appointed panel has described as a hijack.”

Wall Street Journal: “When the Japanese and European companies that pioneered high-speed rail agreed to build trains for China, they thought they’d be getting access to a booming new market, billions of dollars worth of contracts and the cachet of creating the most ambitious rapid rail system in history. What they didn’t count on was having to compete with Chinese firms who adapted their technology and turned it against them just a few years later.”

Wall Street Journal: “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke fired back amid criticism at home and abroad of the Fed’s easy-money policies, arguing that China and others are causing global problems by preventing their currencies from strengthening as their economies boom.”

WorldNetDaily: “Napoleon said of the Middle Kingdom, ‘Let (China) sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.’ The shaking has begun. So the question arises: Who put us in this predicament? Who awakened, fed and nurtured this tiger to where she is growling at all Asia and baring her teeth at the United States? Answer: the free trade uber alles Republicans.”

Associated Press: “The world’s cardinals met Friday in a rare Vatican summit to discuss the most pressing issues facing the church, including the sex abuse scandal, religious freedom and the conversion of Anglicans to Catholicism.”

New York Times: “Chen Xiaofeng was a poor farm girl. The man accused of killing her, Li Qiming, is the son of Li Gang, the deputy police chief in the Beishi district of Baoding. The tale of her death is precisely the sort of gripping socio-drama — a commoner grievously wronged; a privileged transgressor pulling strings to escape punishment — that sets off alarm bells in the offices of Communist Party censors. And in fact, party propaganda officials moved swiftly after the accident to ensure that the story never gained traction. Curiously, however, the opposite has happened.”

Yahoo (Reuters): “The Vatican warned Beijing on Thursday not to force Catholic bishops loyal to the pope to attend the ordination of a bishop who is a member of the state-backed church that does not recognize the pontiff.”

Associated Press: “A congressional advisory panel is recommending that lawmakers prod the Obama administration into tougher action against what it calls China’s policy of keeping its currency undervalued.”

The Globe and Mail: “Mr. Soros even went so far as to say that at times China wields more power than the U.S. because of the political gridlock in Washington. ‘Today China has not only a more vigorous economy, but actually a better functioning government than the United States,’ he said, a hard statement for him to make because he spent much of his life donating to anti-communist groups in Eastern Europe.”

Reuters: “China will unveil food price controls and crack down on speculation in agricultural commodities to contain inflationary pressure that its central bank governor highlighted as a risk on Tuesday.”

“Central to China’s approach are policies that champion state-owned firms and other so-called national champions, seek aggressively to obtain advanced technology, and manage its exchange rate to benefit exporters.”

Associated Press: “Nearly 128,000 Chinese students studied in America in 2009-10, a 30 percent increase over the previous academic year, the annual study by the Institute of International Education found.”

Associated Press: “Staking his ground in the global fight over the world’s major currencies, President Barack Obama on Friday disputed claims that the U.S. was deliberately weakening the dollar while accusing China of manipulating its yuan.”

Associated Press: “Leaders of 20 major economies on Friday refused to back a U.S. push to make China boost its currency’s value, keeping alive a dispute that raises fears of a global trade war amid criticism that cheap Chinese exports are costing American jobs.”

Christian Science Monitor: “As G20 leaders gather in Seoul Thursday – their first meeting in Asia – to seek to rebalance the world economy, some economists here are warning the United States that it should not worry about China’s and other regional currencies being too weak; rather, it should worry if they get stronger.”

Reuters: “China kept up a drumbeat of criticism of U.S. easy money policies on Tuesday, warning two days before a G20 world economic summit that Washington could destabilize the global economy and inflate asset bubbles.”

Bloomberg: “China will force banks to hold more foreign exchange and strengthen auditing of overseas fund raising, stepping up efforts to curb hot-money inflows that may inflate asset bubbles and add pressure for a stronger yuan.”

Reuters: “G20 leaders must address bottlenecks in the global supply of rare earth elements or risk blockages in economic growth and the fight against climate change, industry groups from around the world said on Monday.”

Associated Press: “The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a jailed democracy activist is a political attack on China, a Chinese leader said Friday, warning that countries acknowledging the honor would ‘bear the consequences.’”

Financial Times / Global Economy: “China, Brazil and Germany on Thursday criticised the Fed’s action a day earlier, and a string of east Asian central banks said they were preparing measures to defend their economies against large capital inflows.”